When discussing a channel such as SiIvaGunner, there are a lot of factors you can point toward in terms of what's kept it all so appealing. A lot of my posts, including the very one I made just last week on Week 4 ~ Wanting to Funk The Truth, cover how the channel serves as a creative outlets for budding musicians to express their passions and interests to an audience open to listen to anything. To some, the channel is a haven to find gems of unbelievable quality; to some, it's the channels ongoing narrative and slowly-bubbling lore that keeps them engaged; to others, the channel is a home to wonderfully surprising events and surprises. Most of these aspects are ones I think you can somewhat concretely point toward with clear examples to explain; Yet today, I'm not delving into any sort of deeper lore dissection, not writing thesis statements on auditory genius, or even trying to discern anything about who Big Purp as a ripper is. Rather, these three rips - Highman, go home youre drunk man, and Cuckman - together embody one of the most nebulous yet appealing boons of the early life of the SiIvaGunner channel: Its bizarre sense of unified community.

Of course, on the surface, that topic doesn't appear to be so strange, does it? Most *things* end up with a fanbase, after all, and it's not even something I've neglected to discuss on here before. A big part of the point in my post on ULTRA S+G was to detail how it felt as if it unified the goings-on on the channel, including all of the hype everyone in the community was feeling. And yet that connection is still something I feel is somewhat...intangible. The thing setting SiIvaGunner as a community apart from the rest is that, since the very beginning, it has almost exclusively existed within the confines of YouTube comments section; not a forum, not a chatroom, not a subreddit, but an ever-ongoing series of replies to the channel's rapidfire uploads. It wasn't until near the beginning of Season 2 that the unofficial fan Discord server opened, the fanbase's only true permanent "home" - and even then, even today, many have still neglected to really partake in it. No, for many years of SiIvaGunner's life, its community has primarily been that of once-an-hour comments from its reoccurring viewers, a live play-by-play commentary immortalized in but the smallest fragments at a time, where naught but the quickest, funniest, most concise voices got wide exposure. And while some names would pop up more frequently at the top than others, a notable example being Emm Bee Sea of A edge of a balcony fame, it was all still a big wild west, a community of naught but voices reacting to the goings-ons.

While that feeling still persists in some sense today, the unique appeal that the earliest years of SiIvaGunner had in particular was that this community, this gaggle of random people whose notoriety would basically reset from upload to upload, were almost guaranteed to be *just* like you. Today, a SiIvaGunner fan could be any number of things, joined at any point in the channel's life, for any of the many reasons that draw people in, such as the reasons from the first paragraph. But in Season 1 in particular, with the channel's identity still being messy and undecided, EVERYONE was just as curious as the next to figure out what the hell the channel was, and it felt as it everyone in turn was watching the same rips as you; even with the insane rate of uploads, it was as if everyone was on the same page about what was going on. Rips like Live and Ooooooooooooooh, and jokes like the Coconut Gun rap of CG Man HD Remastered Edition, all became overnight legends through just single rip appearances, while rips like Respect Your Elders (20X-Mix) played off of jokes that only the kind of person who would be a SiIvaGunner fan in 2016 would be aware of. The community's smaller size, compounded with the smaller amount of rips available, made it feel as if everyone's experience with the channel was sort of...universal.

In all earnest, you could probably draw some pretty clear parallels between the early days of SiIvaGunner and the early years of the internet as a whole. Back when everyone online knew about Chuck Norris memes, when cat memes were all the rage, when every celebrity scandal became ingrained into the culture of the web for the next months to come, and so fourth. But its when you combine this more tight-knit community, with Season 1's trademark spontaneous-ness - the Season that could give you anything from the great seaweed to Because I Love You to Can't Say Goodbye to Yesterday - as performed by Bob Dylan at the drop of a hat- when you end up with something truly unique to Season 1 of SiIvaGunner. In short, it's through this combination of factors that you end up with the magical trilogy of rips on feature today. Big Purp's NES Mega Man rips may, in isolation, divorced of context, appear to be nothing but low-effort shitposts; yet it was in being released at this specific time, to this specific kind of a community, that gave them a genuinely magical flavor.

To start is, of course, just the fact that they're all funny as shit, and all in the kind of way that Season 1 did best. With no adherence or admittance to quality control, with so little in the way of expectations for what the channel could do, you so often wound up with rips that just hit their punchline UNBELIEVABLY well. Pikmin Park would be my go-to perfect example of this, but if I ever had to provide a second example, it might well be Highman: Big Purp's rip of the Elec Man Stage theme from the first Mega Man game. Whilst not the most popular tune nor from the most popular game, Elec Man Stage has a really solid, pleasant melody and tune to it, a "classic" piece of old game music - yet three seconds into Highman, and the rug is completely pulled under you. The bass-only intro to the song remains unchanged, like the band setting the stage for the lead guitar, yet that lead instrument lands but a single note before holding on it, rising, ever rising in pitch - not long after rising to the point of becoming completely inaudible. You just clicked on this video to listen to cool Mega Man music, and before you can even register what's going on, the main melody just flies away, leaving the song as just a bassline and percussion. It's such a damn simple joke, and yet I distinctly remember how it caught me off guard way back in the day. "Oh, ohhhh, there he goes. Bye!" reads one 8-year old comment; "WAIT COME BACK I NEED YOUR WEAPON TO BEAT ICE GUY" reads another - despite being such an incredibly simple edit, I can't be alone in having been got good by it, right?!

And like, even though none of us then knew who could have possibly ripped it, when go home youre drunk man dropped just a few months later, I feel like we all KNEW it was a spiritual successor, a rip with a similar allure of "classic NES Mega Man music" immediately subverted by the funniest rugpull possible. Because again - it felt as if EVERYONE had already seen that old Elec Man rip: "After Elec man left us(into the stratosphere) Metal man's dependency on alcohol became incredibly apparent." reads one old comment of many. Indeed, go home youre drunk man is perhaps even more simple of a joke than even Highman, but I cannot overstate how fucking funny it is to click on an inconspicuous link of video game music only to be met with pitchshifting intentionally done to have every note sound as drunkard and discordant as possible. The call-and-response between the main melody and the five-note backing done at the very start of the track gets me every time, with just the mental imagery of the band calling over from one isle to the other and the other side being JUST as shitfaced as the first: again, remarkably simple as a bit, as with much of Season 1, but the sheer novelty kept it lodged in my mind for the weeks therafter.

Sure enough, again, even though Cuckman released with no credit attached, despite the plethora of other rips released on the channel; When I saw it drop in the subfeed, I could TELL that it was going to draw from the very same source. And wheras Highman was a rip about just...sending the lead melody up to the stratosphere, Cuckman instead does the opposite: repeating a section of the lead melody over and over again, with each loop lowering just slightly in pitch to where it goes from walking in place into a depressive spiral. That's funny in its own right - yet, just like with go home youre drunk man, our fellow commenters were forming their own little stories and narratives about Cut Man based on both this rip and the Big Purp rips that preceded it! "Cutman and Elecman went their separate ways after the Wily wars" reads one; "After Elec Man's ascendance, and Metal Man's fall into alcoholism, Cut Man became obsessed with trying to reach the center of the Earth." reads another; "Fun fact: after seeing how Elec Man ascended beyond understanding, cut man fell on the floor, and uh, died." reads a third, and this all just kept going! It's so hard to put into words just how much more fun it made all of these rips releasing in succession to see that your experience in seeing them all one after another was pretty much a universal experience - and it paired with the sheer absurdity of the jokes made each one plainly unforgettable.

I feel like this post has been spouting a lot of words to basically just say that...there was something truly unique about how early SiIvaGunner operated, that allowed every single rip to feel just a little bit magical. This perfect storm of a small fanbase, a lack of a true community gathering spot, and a channel driven on outputting as many surprising punchlines as possible, that led to each rip feeling like an *event* that EVERYONE was attending. It was thanks to this unified voice we all shared that events like The Reboot and its ARG as discussed back on I Saw a Brainwasher Today, or the bizarre Mr. Rental antics on Mr. Rental [B Side] ~ Out of Options, hit so closely: It felt, through the sense that we had ALL been on this journey together, like every shake-up and revelation to the channel's status quo was affecting us, collectively, personally.